Cheryl Katz

If I were a conservative evangelical Christian, I’d be thinking thusly:

What in heaven’s name is Sarah Palin doing being Governor of Alaska with 5 kids at home?  What kind of good Christian mother leaves her children at home to be educated outside the home, where they could be infiltrated by other people’s values?  THEY MIGHT LEARN SCIENCE!!

But I’m not.  So instead I just think /she’s/ the nut job.

1) She sued the Bush Administration for declaring polar bears an endangered species… because that would hinder her plan to drill the bleeding shit out of Alaska.

2) She’s part of an organization called “Feminists for LIfe,” which at its face doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.  Feminists can be pro-life while recognizing it’s none of their damn business to meddle with the interior of anyone else’s uterus, right?  Nooooooooooo.  (Well, I mean, feminists CAN think that way, but it isn’t the case with Feminists for Life.)  Nope.  They think abortion is wrong no matter the case – incest, rape, risk to the mother’s life.

3) John McCain is 72 and has survived cancer like a hundred times.  (Or at least a handful.)  This makes her so much closer to being president than I am even comfortable thinking about.

4) She may or may not actually be the grandmother of her 4-month-old “son,” possibly covering for her unwed 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy.  To summarize, her pregnancy was a total surprise to her coworkers when it was announced at her “7 month mark.”  Pictures do not indicate much showing.  Her daughter had been out of school for 4 months before the child’s birth, supposedly with extended mono.  And in the family’s Christmas photo, who looks pregnant here?

Personally I couldn’t give less of a crap whether or not Bristol was unwed or pregnant.  Or both, as the case may be.  And it’s not that I want Sarah Palin in the white house to start with, but especially not if she’ll lie to cover up for her daughter while simultaneously showing no holds barred on telling other women what to do with their bodies.

I guess with more media attention this rumor will eventually be verified.  What a disaster for the McCain/Palin campaign.

OK, I just had to add the lagging, nagging thought in my head.  Either Sarah Palin is lying to cover up for her daughter, which is icky.  Or she showed some reckless abandon in boarding a plane with leaking amniotic fluid to take a 12-hour flight back to Alaska to deliver this child.  What does that say about her pro-life beliefs?  I’m pro-life, but if the kid has Down’s I don’t really care about delivering safely?  What would this say about her doctor – bordering on malpractice so that her child wouldn’t be a Texan, as Mr. Palin weakly joked?  I know I’m babbling a little bit, but for the love – something is not right here.

Last night I went running with no iPod and no heart rate monitor.  (iPod’s batteries died, and the HRM thinks my max heart rate in a kickbox workout was 5.  Probably a battery problem, but it would have to be sent to the company for repair/replacement, and that service costs more than I spent on the thing in the first place.)

In any case, I wasn’t particularly  motivated to go out in the first place, but the chocolate chip pancakes I threw together for dinner tipped me over to the “squeeze in a workout” side of the balance.  I went out for one of my high intensity runs, just to get it all over with somewhat quickly.

I was surprised to find that going without my accoutrements actually improved the workout (because it was a HIIT run.)  I didn’t rely on music to give me cues about when I should sprint or on the timer for when I should stop – and I didn’t fall back on the music’s rhythm to guide my exertion.  I think that the sprintervals (haha, my own term) I did last night had more intensity and lasted longer.

It did help that I didn’t have to think about switching the hand my iPod was in (yes, I carry it, no armband here) and it was much easier to pump my arms without the headphone cords to get tangled up in.

I’m excited that I actually defied my own will and got the damned workout, but I’m also stoked that doing it in the face of adversity taught me something new.  And to be honest, I’m totally knackered from the run, so I did succeed in pushing myself past my limits.

I don’t regret for a minute that I supported Hillary Clinton through the primary season.

But I sure am happy with Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee.

Today I would pretty much do nothing but complain.  But since I’m long overdue for a post and have nothing much of any consequence to say, here’s what little blood I can squeeze from the rock of my brain.

1) I had a BLT for lunch that had nine (NINE!  9!) slices of bacon on it.  I’m officially done eating for the day – though to be fair, I’m actually pretty well satisfied.  One would hope to get some satisfaction out of nine slices of bacon.

Yup, it’ll be salad with balsamic for dinner, ladies and gents.

2) I’m in a craptacular mood due to some work stuff I need to resolve this week, and some other work stuff involving me spinning a lot of wheels and not seeing much in the way of results.

3) Our neighbors decided to play a rock concert starting at 2:30 AM right into our bedroom window (real, live electric guitar.)  Ben went out to yell at them but another neighbor beat us and totally outdid anything Ben would have done – she went in full tilt with swearing and everything – and shut them right down.  It was hard to get back to sleep after that.

That is about all I have for today.

Need to find a good workout that won’t stress any one part of my body too much – think I need to work off some of this bacon tonight, but I don’t feel like running.  Can anyone recommend a good video they like for light cardio that’s fun to do, burns enough to be worth doing, but won’t knock me on my ass?  Typically I like a good shred, but today I’m already sore and just want a recovery workout.  Any suggestions are welcome.

Jumping rope gives good high intensity intervals… but not as good as sprinting. :/

So….  remember when I posted about the bridesmaid dress that was too small?  I had real concerns at the time that perhaps fitting into the dress I purchased would be a nearly-failing battle.

As it turns out, the dress is now falling off me in all the places that count.  As in, by the time October arrives, it will be grossly too big.  I’m considering taking the dress back to its source at J. Crew and having them do the necessary alterations, though I have a local alterations person who i’ve liked.  However, she isn’t huge and corporate and someone I’d feel comfortable with making do all the work over again if it for some reason comes back with a fatal flaw, whereas J. Crew knows their dresses and can afford to suck up a few dollars re-doing their own work if it comes back with a broken zipper or crooked seam.

Hmm.

I recently discovered a phenomenon that is sweeping the nation, and I think it really works for me!  It’s called High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and I’ve added it into my rotation of cardio workouts this week.

The idea of it is that three times a week or so, I do workouts that push my capacity with short repeating circuits of intense cardio work followed by a period of recovery time.

The way I executed this on Monday was I jogged for 5 minutes at a light pace, to get warmed up.  Then I ran as hard and fast as I physically could, until I was on the verge of asthma attack and/or no longer maintaining that level of exertion, but only for about 30 seconds.  Then I jogged an extremely light recovery for 90 seconds (in reality, the recovery started with walking, because that was all I could muster for a few seconds after all-out exertion.)

Rinse, repeat.  I managed 4 reps total before I had to take it down to a light jog and then cool down.  I got a total of 20 minute workout, which my heart rate monitor reported to me thusly:

Max HR: 181 (95% of “max heart rate”)
Avg. HR: 141

Calories burned: 178

That’s not as many calories as I’d have burned if I’d been jogging the whole time.  However, according to HIIT science, the short bursts of crazy intense activity throw my body into a tizzy burning fat in an attempt to recover, and the elevated metabolism last as long as 24 hours.  (My resting heart rate did not return to 58 as it usually does in the hour after a workout; this time it got back down to about 62 or 63, and I retained the hot feeling long after I’d showered and gone to bed.

I’m no scientist, and I realize I’m not writing especially empirically on this matter.  So if you want more clinical or experienced information about this, google “high intensity interval training,” or look at the following links:

www.hiitsource.com – a pleasant read about HIIT
http://musclemedia.com/training/hiit.asp – a little body-building centric, but this site offers a plan that starts with a 4-min a day workout.  Awesome!
http://www.exrx.net/FatLoss/HIITvsET.html – if you like science and clinical studies, this is the page for you.

So here’s my current fitness “plan” such as it were:

Monday: high intensity intervals run, possibly followed by a pilates or yoga session or a low intensity workout (I just enjoy the feeling of an extended workout!)

Tuesday: extended endurance run

Wednesday: other HIIT activity (tonight I’m going to try jumping rope.) followed by a strength training session

Thursday: whatever I feel like, or day off

Friday: HIIT of some sort.

Saturday and Sundays I like to do extended runs on these days just because time is so much more plentiful.  I always always squeeze in a second fitness activity on each day of the weekend, sometimes even a third.

I’ve already noticed a difference in the way my arms look – less fatty.  I imagine after a few weeks of this, I may just look awesome (trying to keep my expectations reasonable, k?)

A few notes to self (and readers!) here:  I think the time of gauging fitness level by the numbers on the scale is coming to an end.  As I burn fat, I am also building muscle, and these are likely to be at odds with, if not negate altogether, each other.  I’m writing this because putting it out there in the world and in my own public thoughts means that I must acknowledge that this has crossed my mind.

Second, I must resist the urge to think “Suckahzzzzz” every time I see people busting out two hours of cardio drudgery in the name of weight loss***.  I feel like I have been let in on a huge, fortunate secret, even if it’s one that many people have known for a very long time, according to the internets. Nothing I’ve ever done had burned fat off my body in two days the way HIIT has already done.  Plus, it’s improving my base speed and endurance.  I did a standard endurance run yesterday and it was much, much easier than before I’d done the high intensity workout.  I don’t know if it’s that my body responds to training exceptionally quickly or if it’s just that my expectations have shifted.  I just thought that an hour long run would have been much harder than it wound up to be.  I found it easy to run through my fatigue because it just wasn’t as hard work as the high intensity intervals had been.

I’m so excited that my coworker Jeremy mentioned this to me; I’d been complaining that my running improved too quickly and I wasn’t getting the same challenging workout on similar routes as I had been a week or two ago.  He mentioned this as a way to change up my routine and shake off the plateau.  I will certainly report back with more info as I have it (possibly even some pictures!)

***I know that time spent exercising is better than not doing it at all, and I can hardly knock anyone for putting in the effort. But why waste one’s time when such a short workout even only once a week can make such a huge difference?

I’ve been into running lately, but my running schedule is dependent on two things.

First, my jogging stroller’s operating condition.  The only real variable is the inflation level of the tires.  On Wednesday I pumped my tires, but my pump had some kind of malfunction between the second and third tire.  While I tried not to let this stop me, and went with the front tire and one rear tire inflated, the truth is that this was a tedious workout because the stroller listed leftward.  The. Whole. Time.  I corrected for this by occasionally switching sides of the street so that sometimes the tilt of the sidewalkcountered the list of the wheels.  (I have to switch sides of the street at intervals to keep my knees and ankles happy anyway.)  But it was a big challenge and distraction that I hope to avoid.

Second, Ben’s availability.  If the stroller is out of commission, as it was on Thursday due to bike pump malfunction, then the other option is for Ben to be home with Sami so that I can go out and run solo, sans-stroller.  I actually prefer this, but Ben’s work schedule gets more hectic as the September primary and then the November general elections approach.  So I can’t always depend on Ben’s availability unless we plan well, and in advance.

On Thursday Ben had an onslaught of work, and so he couldn’t come home according to our plan.  I couldn’t get the bike pump to give me any love, and I was about to be really bummed.  I was ready to throw the whole workout day and just slump into self pity for the evening.

After Sami went to bed, I pulled out my last scrap of willpower and said, f*ckit, if I can’t go running I’ll do a workout video.  It’s better than nothing, right?

Well, it was better than better than nothing.  I did Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred. I don’t think much of cardio videos as a replacement for running, but this video worked me out in ways I don’t typically do – lunges, squats, repetitive strength exercises using light weights, abdominal work using better than just basic crunches, and easy yet effective cardio moves. (Jumping jacks get the heart rate up faster than almost anything! Who knew?)

The workout is a series of three circuits, each containing 3 minutes of strength, two minutes of cardio and one minute of abs. There’s a warmup and cooldown. And it’s the most effective 22 minutes I’ve probably ever spent working out.

I did this video on the intro level.  I presumed I’d have to do it twice, or do the first and second levels, to get a good workout, but I was wrong.  I sweat buckets and feel like I did get a significantly effective workout.  The next day I was sore in pleasant and productive ways (not like the hip abductor experiment of 7/19.)

I think I have a lot left to gain even from Level 1 of this video, not to mention the rest of it.

I highly recommend it to anyone, whether fitness buffs in a time crunch or a beginner looking for an all around comprehensive introductory workout.  20 minutes is such an easy committment for health and fitness!

I watched the opening ceremonies with Jen last night, and I actually spent most of the time with my mouth gaping open.  The first hour was just one impressive feat of technological showmanship after another (hello, unscrolling Largest LED Screen In The World, As Long As A Football Field And With People Dancing On It!  or the costumes that lit up on and off during the piece with the bird and the birds’ nest?)

I’d had it recording on our DVR and paused for about an hour and a half before we started watching, so we were able to watch about the first 3 hours without having to see commercials.  Eventually we got tired of the Parade of Nations and I just fastforwarded until we were watching live TV.  Some time around this point, we cut to a shot of the Bushes, in their holy non-priority seating, batman – they were seated like average joes at a baseball game, and boy did W look like he wanted a beer.  And the prez was more-than-glancing at his watch.  International goodwill events are sooooooo boring and time consuming.  Yup.

Well, despite my criticism of the US president, I did actually skip a lot of the parade of nations.  Until I couldn’t fast forward any more, and then we admired outfits and rooted for the little guys.  And THEN Yao Ming and a 9 year old boy who looked like a toddler next to him led the Chinese olympians into the arena.  And it was just a huge time.

The little boy had been a hall monitor, and when his school was destroyed in the earthquakes in Szechuan province a few months ago, after he freed himself from the rubble he WENT BACK to help his teachers and classmates.  He was quoted saying that he felt it was his responsibility, as he was a class leader.

I admit that I’m prone to cry any time the national anthem is played.  Epic events really get to me.  But live news coverage of the earthquakes really touched me at the time, and this boy’s story just pushed me over.  Real tears, people, not the kind that come from anthems.

I can’t bring myself to delete the DVR event just yet.

I don’t know what made me do it, but last week, I got home from work, strapped Sami into the stroller with a good sippy and a book, and went running.

Actually, I do know what made me do it.  I wanted to make some use of my heart rate monitor. I’ve decided that since my weight loss results through diet modification alone are not only tapering off but leaving me a little jigglier than I am comfortable with.  The time is right for me to step into this fitness thing, whole hog, and make it work.

Well, I went running four times last week, went to one kickboxing class, did a few pilates videos… and I started this week much stronger than last week.  By a long shot, actually.  I went for an hour long run on Saturday, a half hour run yesterday, and today I did a slightly longer run than on Saturday, adding a few more twists and turns into my route, but I did it in ten minutes less time.  I ran all but two blocks of the run.

My conclusion is: it’s much easier to get into better performance shape when carrying around less body mass.  It just is.  I made a few feeble attempts at jogging back in the winter and never had this kind of success.

I did something on this run that I would never have done even up to a month ago.  I wore spandex capri yoga pants, yo.  All my regular workout clothes are, predictably, in the laundry, since I’ve been doing a lot of exercising.  Instead of doing the Old Cheryl thing of just saying, F it, I don’t have optimal shorts, I’ll just veg instead, I made do and got my butt out there.  Also, my butt just doesn’t look THAT bad in these pants.  I wouldn’t necessarily wear them to the office or to the supermarket, but it’s fine to get me through the run I desperately needed to NOT blow off.

I feel so good about running right now that I replaced my old shoes (had ‘em since late ’05) and bought myself proper running shorts that won’t itch or chafe.  Maybe I’ll enter a 3k in the near future!

I am feeling quite chuffed with myself at the moment.